Crossing that finish line and receiving the finisher medal was an exhilarating experienece, especially, the finisher medal was very nicely designed with my favorite instrument.

The San Jose RnR event’s main draw is the 13.1 mile half marathon through/arond downtown San Jose. I opted for the less vigorous category and got a taste of a major running event. The mini marathon was 5-miles total, on the smaller loop around downtown San Jose. The biggest surprise for me was how large the event was: over 16000 runners showed up! It felt like the biggest party in town standing in this crowd. Few things I enjoyed of the event:

1) RnR Series knows how to run a large event. It was super organized. No confusion of what to expect and on the date of. I knew this was going to be a large event, but it still caught me by surprise of how “large” it turned out. I drove, thinking I could find plenty of parking structure around downtown. Well, the back-up from the 280-87 interchange was more than a mile. I took a quick exit off 87 and went to a VTA station instead. That was also on the “how-to” information by the RnR organizers. I made it in time.

(Gear checked illustrated how ogranized & large the event was)

2) Did I mention people/residents come out and cheer the runners? That was the most awesome part of the event! The RnR series had live band every mile but the “resident” musicians were just heart warming. The local middle school kids were cheerleading and holding signs. “Go Stragners!” That made me a laught a good half mile.

3) The crowd energy of running in a large pack really made a fun event for me. Granted I was a bit unprepared for the colder-morning temperature, since I usually trained in the evening. I still finished better than I had planned for. A large part was because of the fact that I was with streams of runners. There were runners ahead of me, next to me, and behind me. There were runners dressed in all sorts of fashion (tall hats, tutu’s, in teams), in all shapes (kids, on a scotter, in their 80s), and in all speed (walking, jogging, and flying!)